Power of Women hen you walk into a room and fewer than 50% of the people there are women, “it should look peculiar,” said Madeline Di Nonno, executive director of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, “and it doesn’t.” Marianne Williamson, in her lead-up to the upcoming November conference: SISTER GIANT: Women, Non-Violence […]

Diane Lefer: Citizen lobbying is most effective when the decision maker can see you face-to-face (in their district or Capitol office or at a town hall meeting) or at least hear your voice on the phone.

Steve Mikulan: Walmart’s biggest black eye came from a story outlining how the head of the retailer’s Mexican operations spent $24 million bribing officials there to fast-track its expansion in Mexico.

Rev. Irene Monroe: But, our culture’s present-day cavalier use of the n-word speaks less about our rights to free speech and more about how we as Americans — both White and Black — have become anesthetized to the damaging and destructive use of this epithet.

Tom Degan: I imagine that it must not have been easy being Lenny Bruce. He was a man who saw the world as it really is – minus the rose-colored lenses that were the fashion rage during the age of Eisenhower and the New Frontier. “People should be taught what is”, he told us, “not what should be”. There had never been a comedian like him before. His humor was real. It could even be bleak. But he was always – to the very end – screamingly funny. That his was a troubled soul there can be no argument. Newsweek once described him as a “self-destructive genius of a dirty time.”

Steven Conn: A Republican member of Congress wants to remove the visage of Ulysses S. Grant from the $50 bill and substitute Ronald Reagan. But why? Historian Steven Conn speculates that the party wants to make its past match its present orthodoxy.

President Obama was the one that was most in tuned to both the welfare of the Gay citizenry and the liberal views I hold near and dear. I campaigned for him, he won, and now it seems my role, and that of all his supporters is to support him.

I had conversations with four recently married same-sex couples during the first week of January. There were two lesbian couples, one from the Sacramento area (Davis) and the other from West Hollywood. The two gay couples were from the Bay Area and Orange County. Along with my spouse, we represented five of the over 18,000 […]

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Walker Foley: Elected officials seem to think there’s only one side of this property rights argument. The people who live in these communities have rights too, but the oil companies seem to have the jump on [the politicians’] side of the fence.